About 2 weeks ago, I installed Freespire as well because I had a laptop, and I had been donating my processor time to Malaria research through "Bionic", and low and behold, a frigging virus made it through it somehow, but my virus scanner caught it, and that was the last straw, and so within 10 minutes...yes, with 10 MINUTES I was up and running with Freespire!!! It was by far the easiest install I've ever done in my life!!! I figure that if I've suffered through installations, and re-installations of Windows, and litterally pulling my hair out for days trying to get the damn thing to work, then I'll be able to figure out Linux! Besides, with the support of the Linux Gods here at Microsuck, I'll be in great hands!!!
Freespire is the community based off-shoot of Linspire. Yes, they are teaming up with Ubuntu, but they will be separate entities, and they will be sharing Linspire's Click-N-Run technology, but as to what Linspire will be getting from Ubuntu, I don't know.
Anyway, Freespire is extremely easy to use, and I did toy with many different distros using the LiveCD's, and other than Xandros, Freespire was one of the only ones that actually worked right off the disk, so here I am running Linux on my newish Toshiba Satellite laptop!
As with every OS there are some issues, such as Icons disappearing when you reboot. Of course if you compare this to the flickering of the icons in Win XP, then it is bearable because they've acknowledged it, and they are going to be fixing it; unlike Microsoft knowing about, and doing nothing about it because they don't have to. With the new update to the OS, they will be fixing different bugs such as installation of Flash Version 9. Currently they have 7 on there, and one of the first sites I went to was Linkin Park (No Snickering!!!), and I was told to update to the latest version and I wasn't able to get into the site. Firefox will not allow me to use differnt fonts in Gmail, and once again this is acknowledged. One program that is made especially for Linspire, and Freespire is "Lsongs", and it loaded up, but there is absolutely no sound, and I couldn't find a fix for this issue. I was rather disappointed about this because I was looking forward to putting a whole hackey sack of music on there....I think Calum has some MP3's out there;-). I tried to install America's Army, through the CNR, and it never did install even though it did say it was. However, there are certainly tons, and I mean tons of other programs out there to download, and I have to say the installation happened exactly as they said it will "ONE CLICK!" No fuss, and no muss! Am I able to install other programs without CNR? Yes, although I haven't explored this option yet, but after seeing my Geek install Fedora Core 6, and using apt get...hey, how hard is that?
Overall, it's a new OS, and it is going to take some time for me to be comfortable with it, but comparing my negative experiences with Microsoft to what I've just experienced with Freespire, I don't think I'm going to have near as many problems with Linux.
a1mck
